Air de Paris and Dorothy Iannone are pleased to invite you to the artist's second solo exhibition at Air de Paris, with works spanning the period 1961–2015: paintings, drawings, films, objects and books, all with a markedly narrative and overtly autobiographical visual feel.

An exhilarating ode to an unbridled sexuality and the celebration of ecstatic coupling and unconditional love, the Iannone oeuvre has frequently faced censorship problems, in particular in the case of the exhibition Friends, organized by Harald Szeemann at the Bern Kunsthalle in 1969. Iannone later recreated the event in full in her bookwork The Story of Bern.

Welcome To Our Show is an opportunity to engage with the irresistible generosity of a singular artist deeply attached to Eros as a philosophical concept. Asked once how she would like to go down in history, Iannone replied, “As a lover . . . and to myself, I thought, 'A successful lover'. Later I realized that such qualifications are (I hope) irrelevant. My life is and has been defining the kind of lover I am. Perhaps I do not yet know the word to describe it; nonetheless, I am there, like you, vibrating in our home of presently estimated billions of galaxies, and my attempt, like some of yours, to find the center of myself and to regain the garden of joy, is the only lover’s attribute through which I can, if not with certainty, then at least with yearning, define myself.”

Pursuing Max Ernst’s marks in Sedona, the French artist Maxime Rossi explores the particular landscape of Arizona and the bewitching appearance of its extensive and stony desert which has profoundly marked the spirit and the work of the surrealist artist in exile. By looking for a Hopi ruin once inhabited by Ernst, Maxime Rossi offers with “Real Estate Astrology” (2015) a hallucinatory journey tinted by a surrealistic survey in which astrology and mysticism seems to fill the paradoxes of history.
Maxime Rossi was born in 1980, he lives and works in Paris, France. He has mounted solo exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo, at the Emba / Galerie Édouard-Manet, Gennevilliers, screenings at Centre Pompidou, France and MUMOK, Vienna as well as inclusion in group exhibitions at Fondation François Schneider, Wattwiller, La Halle des bouchers, Vienne, the 19th Biennale of Sydney, S.M.A.K., Ghent and Galerie Le Minotaure, Paris among others.

Between the 13th March and the 18th April 2015, Art : Concept will present Bivalve & Monocouche, a unique exhibition featuring Richard Fauguet. After his 2003 Châtaigne et vin blanc exhibition, this show, which could have been titled, not without irony: “Le cubi et le visage”, will allow us to re-discover the hybrid and dual character typical of the artist’s universe. From the busts covered with game-marbles (1997) to the coconut-heads (2000), from his Tipp-Ex drawings to the postcards with pouring-spout appendages (2007-2013), the emergence of dual imagery crosses the greatest part of his work.

The exhibition space will be constructed like an enigmatic landscape split in two: A yellow, almost chemical-looking sea on one side, on which women’s heads seem to float in an invasive movement of flooding of the gallery’s floor. A shelf full of glass- plate drawings provides a line of horizon. On an aesthetic level, duality is expressed as much by the glass drawings, with their games of cast shadows on the wall creating doubles, as by the series of clay heads, for which double-valve mollusks have been selected and into which the empty shells have been embedded. Some of these heads are double, just like the God Janus, while others seem to stare at their own reflection in the bag on which they rest, in an attitude that seems to eco the myth of Narcissus. One way or another, all of them have two faces. They are figures of hybridism: fish-and-woman, alien-and-woman or gorgon-and-woman. They almost seem to follow an extremely classical sculptural pattern: However, the materials and techniques employed – double-valve shells of all sorts that have been consumed by the artist and then grafted into the clay to create heads – points at procedures that make them more akin to collages than to a sculptural practice in its traditional sense. Similarly, his drawings often are reassembled scraps of papers that have been torn out of magazines with the help of adhesive strips.

The exhibition as a whole tends to function as a mental collage that assembles a great diversity of universes, imaging systems and seemingly antithetic references: sea and land, antiquity versus Rocaille, the nobleness of an art opposed to the triviality of the materials employed. The result is the production of a rococo yet poor line of aesthetics. Both in his drawings and in his sculptures, Richard Fauguet revisits the most classical poses, with the help of glossy fashion magazines as far as the drawings are concerned, and with the help of the embossing effects of a fish-based tasting menu when it comes to sculpture.

This work recalls his 2012 play-dough series based on the portraits of Picasso’s partners, but things are a little different here: The celebrity-pantheon has given way to women from his entourage as well as perfect strangers. The coexistence of marine creatures, or rather what is left of them, with clay heads severed from their bodies, allows Richard Fauguet to propose a deviant version of the myth of Medusa, in which the Gorgon is coupled with its petrified victim. Fixed into blocks of clay but deliberately not solidified by cooking, these heads are not dissimilar to the skulls produced by some of the rituals of the Paleolithic, in which skulls were covered with shells in what looked like an attempt to deny the disappearance of the face. Reference to these cults, which in Georges Didi’s Huberman’s opinion were contemporary of the first forms of portrait, inscribes the artist’s work within the history of portraiture since its origin: “ The tradition of portrait maybe began the day when our eyes looked down with terror and dismay at a loved and familiar face fallen to the floor and never to get up again.”

Julia Mossé // Translation Frieda Schumann

Play on words referring to Georges Didi-Huberman’s text: “The Cube and the Face” written in 1993, about a sculpture by Alberto Giacometti. Here the word “cube” has been substitued with the word “cubi” (the“Bag-in-Box” type of container often used for cheap wine)
** Georges Didi-Huberman: “Le Visage et la Terre” in Artstudio, summer 1991, n°21

Richard Fauguet was born in 1962 in La Châtre. He lives and works in Châteauroux. His work has been purchased by numerous public collections among which: Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris; Frac Île-de-France, Paris; Frac Limousin, Limoges; MAC/VAL, Vitry-sur-Seine and Les Abattoirs, Toulouse. Several personal exhibitions have been consecrated to his work in the last years: Vivement demain, MAC/VAL, Vitry-sur-Seine (2012); Selon Arrivage, Art:Concept, Paris (2011); Ni vu, ni Connu, Frac Limousin, Limoges (2011); Pas vu, pas pris, frac Île-de-France, Paris (2009).

The gallery is pleased to announce the first solo show by Peter Regli in France. From April 24 to May 23, the artist (1959, Andermatt, Switzerland) presents a unique ensemble of sculptures that brings together emblematic figures and themes of his « Hackings » series.

Initiated in the 1990s, these actions or interventions exploit the sociological environment as raw material and express themselves in isolated places extending to the four corners of the earth (the geographical center of Nevada or the southernmost point of Africa), or in the street (in New York, Zurich or Genoa), the ultimate public space. Between interventionism and happening, his nearly punk approach always aims to transgress the rules whether they be legal, sociocultural or geographical. On a purely plastic level, his work often takes the form of monumental sculptures, whose dimensions go beyond human perception. As in the case of Reality Hacking No 170, an « invisible circle » made of 2,000 coins tossed into New York waters from a moving boat, marking out Manhattan Island (1999) or his artificially made island in the middle of Lake Uri Lake visible only from plane or a specific mountain-top (2002).

Applying a notion of informatics to the material and tangible world, Peter Regli takes possession of ultra-familiar images and figures to implant them into the least expected places: snowmen in countries where snow never falls (South Africa, Vietnam), a quintet of laughing Buddhas installed in the courtyard of an auditing firm building in Zurich. In both cases, these actions illustrate the lack of references to talk about the culture of the Other. Globalized flow does not necessarily go with a better understanding of belief systems. The spiritual strength of Buddhist philosophy is eagerly embraced by Western societies, and the symbolic value of the snowman is Southeast Asia remains hardly exportable. The cluster of tumid phalluses shown in the exhibition obey the same logic. In Bhutan they represent protective symbols, here they trigger a very different kind of reaction. Teddy bears, Buddhas and penis sculptures are thus gathered in the same space-and-time, where folklores collide and the opposition between the secular and the sacred implodes.

The medium itself is no less unexpected. The childlike and playful forms made of marble or untreated rock create a fantastic contrast. The use of stone, especially highlighted in this exhibition, has been a constant in his work; we can easily think to his Faked Meteorites (1996) or the stone he secretly added to the celtic circle of Vaison la Romaine (2002). Put together, placed on top of each other, marked by the artist or left raw, these stones remind us of both totemic figures and megalithic art. And if their meaning remains as enigmatic, they refer one way or another to the history of mankind and civilizations.

Julia Mossé

Born in 1959 in Andermatt (Switzerland), Peter Regli lives and works in New York. His work is present in many Swiss public collections among The Kunsthaus, Zürich, The Fotomuseum Winterthur and the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich. Several personal exhibitions have been consecrated to his work in the last years: Peter Regli, Snow Monsters, Flatiron Plaza, New York (2015), Ages of Smoke, Istituto Svizzero, Milan (2014) et Sleeping Stone, KARMA, Amaganset (2014).

Let us begin with the legs. They are thick, bowed, cumbersome things—like the crusty paw of an elephant or the trunk of a vast tree ringed and ringed again by time. Ozymandias’s fate will not be ours, these figures seem to say, holding on for dear life, or to dear earth, with all their might. Their heads are attenuated, leprous and shriveled, as if battered on a battlefield, or simply pinched between someone’s fingers for too long. Sometimes, there’s no head at all; the familiar ball that once balanced atop a thin line atop a torso seems to have rolled right off. Bodies: they slump and sag and bend and bob.

Time is the great conceit of the sculptures of Simone Fattal. Kneaded clay suggests the repeated touch of a human hand, but also summons up the ravages of time. Figures look as old as the earth and yet, they breathe. “The dead are coming back in order to fight again” reads a line from The Beirut-Hell Express, a poem from 1983 by the poet Etel Adnan. The dead speak to us, too: I once was a warrior. I once was a father. I once was master of this land. I once was I once was echoes again and again. Their grandiloquence is shabby.

But then, they never really died, did they? Fattal’s history is a temporal mishmash, a reckless continuum in which time and place are leveled and the ancients mingle with the moderns. In her collage works, too, the mishmash is evident. Day after day, she cuts up little pieces of magazines, newspapers or advertisements that catch her eye and squirrels them away. They come back—yes, as if from the dead—when it makes sense for them to. Their destination is the picture plane, a place that evokes Andre Malraux’s wistful, unrealized Museum Without Walls. Here is Merce Cunningham and Pina Bausch. Or the faces of Saddam Hussein’s son in laws, creepily frozen in death. In between are ancient Sumerian and Babylonian forms posing as rotted statuary, an ad for a shiny BMW, a Brancusi sculpture, or a photograph of the earth. The artist’s own face often figures in, as well, for she too is a party to this psychic mingling. She, too, is a party to this history.

Hers is a vision of a world in which there is no “pure” and there is no original. In real life, after all, we borrow from here and there. The traces of other people’s wars, loves, and lies are inscribed on our bodies and in our minds. As the products of everything that came before us—Walt Whitman said as much when he said “we contain multitudes”—we are the tea stain on a book, the scar that will not heal, the fabricated memory born of a photo we once saw. It wasn’t our photo and it was probably in a magazine. Our constitutions are a mysterious thing.

It is fitting, then, that Fattal’s works—which span painting, sculpture, collage, and books—bleed one into the other. They shape-shift as one burns bright and another dims. Each form seems to be inflected by a specific moment in a life lived. There were the childhood visits to Palmyra, in Syria, where she once walked among soaring Seleucid and Roman ruins. There was the publishing house she launched upon being displaced by the Lebanese Civil War to seaside California. She called it Post-Apollo, after the moon landing, and with it she made words dance. And there was the fateful encounter with clay that led her to formulate a man with overlong, elephantine legs. She called him Adam and he was familiar. He was the first man. And yet he was also every man.

Bernard Bouche gallery is pleased to announce a group exhibition featuring works by:

CARLO GUAITA

JORGE MOLDER

JOHN MURPHY

Carlo Guaita born in 1954, Palermo, Italy works mainly on paper, as well as sculpture and painting. The artist looks for a new iconography of the modernity. Landscape representation is also an important source of inspiration for his work. Carlo Guaita ponders upon the relations between the work and the elaborated materials, adding conceptual and historical references to it.

Jorge Molder is a prominent representative of the mid-generation of Portuguese artists and an outstanding exponent of contemporary photography. The most important theme in his work is the absurd metaphysics of everyday human life. Most recently his work has revolved around the self-portrait, emphasising light and shadow, extreme angles and off-centre composition in an elegant visual language. Faced with a series of enlarged photos the viewer is confronted with intimacy at both the psychological and physical levels.

John Murphy's practice can be characterised through his use of existing material, such as post cards, books, film stills, painting and poetry. His work often communicates themes of nostalgia, absence and sexuality with a subtle and exquisite gift for exactitude. The artist is preoccupied with the relationship between vision, things and language whilst playing on the theme of similarity and difference.

The exhibition Pliure explores the significance of the book and “the infinite sum of its possibilities” (Blanchot). What can occur to a book when it is in permanent relation with an artistic gesture? How is art transformed in dialogue with a book and how is a book transformed by art? On these occasions, the book becomes a laboratory for aesthetic experiences, while leading towards such experiences by its very essence. This exhibition does not aim to be retrospective, historical, or to function as an anthology. “Pliure” does not claim to embrace an entire theme or to prove a definitive theory but it attempts to show how the realm of books has provoked art and continues to do so. The term “pliure” (fold) refers in part to an action (and even to a specific function in a former printing factory), but also to the trace left by this action and therefore to the fold or the crease this action imprints on the paper. As such, the fold synthesizes the act of doing and what has been done, it is at once a memory and the consequence of a gesture. With the fold, the book has two possibilities: it opens or it closes, reveals or hides. Thanks to the fold, something unexpected is the other side of the page and this is the characteristic mystery of the book.
The exhibition bring together approximately forty works dating from the 16th to the 21st centuries: films, sculptures, installations, paintings and rare books.

“Pliure” questions and enlarges our traditional perception of books and artworks, imbued with the strong belief that, as Mallarmé would say, “there is no explosion but a book”.

The ENSBA (Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts de Paris) will receive the second part of this exhibition. Pliure. Epilogue (la bibliothèque, l’univers), 10 April – 7 June 2015, Palais des Beaux Arts de Paris.

Fabian Knecht's _UNG exhibition at the Galerie Christophe Gaillard creates a breach in our usual aesthetic experience while addressing humorously the atmosphere of disaster of our time. If today it is all about “damage control”, the artist aims at throwing stones in history's windows so that it won't repeat itself.
As we approach the gallery, we can see a backpack laid close to the entrance, as an omen of forgetfulness or a flaw in anti-terrorist regulations. It contains the remains of an action that resulted in the destruction of one of the gallery walls, the debris of which now constitutes the raw material of a brand new whole. One could see this gesture as a common feature to all the presented projects : to destroy to create, to work with what remains, to fetishize the action… ENTFERNUNG is the title of this first visible work that immediately raises the question of the crossing from inside to outside, in one radical move. What happens in the street is as important, but doesn't necessarily make an art work.

To dance on our ashes

Remains of stones coming from Hillah (Irak) or Berlin are also exhibited in the gallery, displayed on a shelf, like relics. Bringing together two moments in history, via objects calling to mind the liberating fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and a murderous suicide attack in 2014 could induce a leveling principle : all action could potentially be artistic, just like to Duchamp “Tout objet était dard” - a play on words between “d'art” (artistic) and “dard” (sting) : “All object was art / sting”. However, when the artist walks through New York on an imaginary meridian going from the city in Irak to the Freedom Tower that filled the gap left by the World Trade Center at Ground Zero, it is as much an artistic gesture as a pilgrimage. Like a penitent covered in ashes, he walks with his face, hair, hands, feet sprinkled with dust from Hillah. The suit he wore as well as a video and a photograph become the traces of the action. A walk through New York, almost 15 years after 9/11, is it a symbolic memory act or a reminder of the indifference to the isolated element ? Indeed, people walking by don't seem to turn around on the ghost wandering amongst them. When we watch Tony Oursler's piece (9/11, 2001), an artist who filmed in length the 2001 terrorist attack and the surrounding life right after the tragedy, we realize that panic wasn't immediate, and that even after the towers were hit the first time, the pedestrian flow continues imperturbably. It is only with the second impact and the beginning of the collapse and smoke cloud, that the crowd starts panicking. Pompei, Herculanum, Nagazaki come to mind… and the artist's figure becomes that of a shadow or a Bûto dancer. The hanged suit calls to mind the rags of the average man's condition, as well as the “Moules Mâliques” in Marcel Duchamp's Grand Verre (1923), or Joseph Beuys' felt suit (Performance Isolation Unit, 1970) or even Larry Bell's suit covered with metal dust (You can't clean snot off suede, 1974), it becomes a sculpture after having been acted. This whole (photograph, video and suit) is entitled VERACHTUNG. Should we see it as a hint to Godard's Le Mépris (1963), in which the male character never takes off his hat ? It is a veiled reference to Dean Martin's hat in Some came running, 1958. The hat, the suit, these are recurring accessories that are here to point out to the spectator that the actor isn't fooled, he knows he's playing a part.

I will burn your museums

To work with what remains, isn't that the everyday lot of a museum ? But to create with the smoke coming from a museum, to create a cloud with the illusion of a treasure box ? The smoke series coming from the roof of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, entitled FREISETZUNG, consists of sketches, drawings, photographs and a video. A white smoke rises from the building and fades slowly in the surrounding city. The aerial views could make us think of a bomb attack while the video shows us the peculiar attitude of the passers-by, taking pictures with their phone or stopping by the side of the road. The opacity contrasts with the modern glass architecture. From afar, one might think of a fire. The feeling of discomfort arises from the formal associations with both the bombing of European cities during the last World War, and also the use of a form that conjures up gas. Of course we will think of the minimalists' invisible or steam sculptures (Robert Morris, Robert Barry), of the vaporous clouds of the Grand Verre Bride, but also certainly of the original use of gas as a weapon of mass destruction during World War I and particularly of what Peter Sloterdijk mentions in Sphären I - Blasen. Admittedly Hitler, himself a victim of mustard gas, still allowed for the gas chambers to be conceived.
What kind of smoke is it ? White in Berlin but black in Zagreb (ENTFACHUNG, 2013). If the first title induces a sense of liberation, the second evokes ignition. We are witnessing something being set in motion, but what ? Setting a museum on fire signifies a symbolic act, a renewed modernity in Duchamp's lineage, but with the bite of the one who will throw a stone at the master's window, that of the “fresh widow” or “french window”, of the house in Normandy in which the author of Air de Paris, 1919 or Elevage de poussière, 1920, was born. ZERBRECHUNG is a photograph of this sacrilegious act committed by the artist with a stone that is said to come from the Picasso Museum in Paris. Thus the story has come full circle, a Picasso leftover breaking into the eye of the father of art “without turpentine”… A little while beforehand, the artist had committed another artistic crime through a window.
ERHEBUNG, Komposition Nr. 2 is an unusual “prepared piano”. The artist appears in the frame of a window open onto a luxurious garden. He overlooks a workshop in which he directs and then drops a black piano on a white piano, thus reenacting a famous Fluxus action, maybe as a remote tribute to Joseph Beuys whose style of clothing he seems to appreciate.
Could Fabian Knecht be creating himself a character in some kind of self-fiction, a “portrait of the artist as a saboteur” ?

It seems as though the colour which I see was its own description. - Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Brown Book (1935).

Sensitive shifts of colour, tactile shifts of colour, between the hands, between gestures, between surfaces, between frameworks, between spaces, between materials and media, between displacements and circulations, between natural and artificial lights, between landscapes, between hours… Where is colour, outside of the word that names it? What is the aim and trajectory of colour? Where is it going, among this fugue of variables, in this arch of fleeting ressemblances, classified nuances, and referenced tonalities? Go look for colour, go sample colour, somewhere in the backwashes of an Icelandic landscape or off the island of Stromboli, somewhere in the subterranean folds of a landscape of water, rock or lava, somewhere in the city or in an industrial glass. Then, afterwards, this question addressed to us by Joan Ayrton: how do we obtain colour? How do we manufacture colour? How do we establish it? How do we see it? How do we control its elusive nature? There is as much a slow quality as there is a fleetingness to colour. Monochrome painting (standalone or as diptychs), films shot on video, photography, hand-blown or smooth glass, paper: are all of these materials and techniques used by Joan Ayrton, each with their own properties, expressions of one of these possibilities?

It is as if this “fast colour” that Joan Ayrton seeks to capture, touch, and see, in its materiality and its imperceptible aspects, in its malleability and lifelessness, in its mechanical reproduction, ephemeral presence and imagery, represents a tension and a challenge made to the eye and body, a unique challenge to sight. The exhibition is composed in six parts – including some new works (Infra-red, Ways of Seeing and Colour is An Image), and others that have not often been presented or that were recently shown (Glass diptych, b & w colours, Poster). For the artist, in the movements that it induces and the transitions it performs, the exhibition becomes like a little treatise on colours that is intimate, personal and sometimes autobiographical. A little treatise on colours in which pass the figures of Leon Battista Alberti, Wittgenstein, English art critic and writer John Berger, filmmaker Derek Jarman, author of Chroma – A Book of Colour (1994) – all in tribute and by affinity.

Fast Colour syncretises and synchronises the instance of colour in both Joan Ayrton’s pictorial and photographic work, since both Infra-red (the first film made by the artist) and Ways of Seeing (a non-digital black and white photographic series) relate to chromatic and bodily transitions and gestures. Both works loop and return to a single image of the horizon and a marine landscape: the film is shot inside a photographic printing laboratory using a digital camera and reveals it in a muffled, dense red, at the limits of the pictorial and the mind. The photographs provide a new and retrospective gaze, through various reframings due to the placement of the artist’s hands inside the chamber at the time of printing. It is truly a question of seeing. It is red that enables us to see what is inside the invisible; it is the hands that enable us to re-vise. It is the four hand-blown coloured glass works of the Colour is An Image series, subtly framed, that re-question this vision of the image – of the image colour – through the production of colours via the precise superposition of two colours (green and red, yellow and green, blue and red). “For through glass, so we find, stream images […]” wrote the Latin poet Lucretius in his De Rerum Natura. Joan Ayrton offers that experience: colour is an image, and that is how we see it. (Marjorie Micucci)